The Platt Report (1964) or the Platt Report(s) on the Reform of Nursing Education was the report of Harry Platt upon the investigations of a committee established by the

Royal College of Nursing The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) is a registered trade union and professional body in the United Kingdom for those in the profession of nursing. It was founded in 1916 as the College of Nursing, receiving its royal charter in 1928. Queen Eliz ...

(RCN). It made recommendations about how

nurses Nursing is a health care profession that "integrates the art and science of caring and focuses on the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and human functioning; prevention of illness and injury; facilitation of healing; and alle ...

should be educated and what prior qualifications should be required in order to begin nurse training in England.

Context

By the 1960s, problems with recruitment of nurses to the

National Health Service The National Health Service (NHS) is the term for the publicly funded health care, publicly funded healthcare systems of the United Kingdom: the National Health Service (England), NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, and Health and Social Care (Northern ...

had been identified by studies, questionnaires, and job analyses. As many as 10,000 students failed to complete training and wastage rates were as high as 50 percent. The RCN established a committee chaired by Platt to look at nursing education and suggest ways to reduce loss of staff during training or soon afterwards. Committee members included Annie Altschul,

Barbara Fawkes Barbara Noel Fawkes (25 December 1914 – 4 October 2002) was a British nurse and nursing educator. She served as Chief Education Officer, General Nursing Council for England and Wales from 1959 to 1974. Biography Fawkes was born in Tonbrid ...

Catherine Hall Catherine Hall (born 1946) is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of B ...

, John Greene

Grace Margery Westbrook Grace Margery Westbrook (13 July 1910 – 30 May 1999) , was the first practising nurse to be elected Chair of the Staff Side of the Nurses and Midwives Whitley Council. Early life and education Westbrook was born on 13 July 1910 in Rotherham ...

and Winifred Hector.

Recommendations

The Platt Report was published in 1964.

Entry requirements

The Platt Report proposed that to be accepted onto nurse training, people should have a minimum of five O-Levels.

Training requirements

The Platt Report stated that trainee nurses should receive two years of academic study and monitored clinical experience, followed by an exam, then another year of work in a hospital under supervision. Nurse training had to cover general medicine and surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics, ear nose and throat medicine, ophthalmology and dermatology. All nurse training schools were to have access to hospitals or groups of hospitals with 300 beds or more. The Platt Report recommended that student nurses remained employees funded by Regional Health Authorities and paid a grant. It recommended different courses for state registered nurses (SRN) and state enrolled nurses (SEN), with a SEN required to complete two years' training and have their name on a roll and an SRN a three-year training programme and have their name on a professional register. Both would receive training grants.

Impact

As Health Minister, Kenneth Robinson rejected suggestions from the Platt Report. The General Nursing Council questioned the Report's "move away from a vocational ethos of nursing." In 1969, the Welsh School of Medicine created a course that provided the first route to a degree in nursing.

References